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The two simple questions every manager must ask themselves

There are two simple yet powerful questions that managers of all kinds must ask themselves if they want to succeed:

What does success look like?

How will I track my progress to achieving it?

These two questions are easy to ask, yet the answers may take time to form.

Ideally you are looking for a metric or a series of metrics that reflect your definition of success. Then you need a way of tracking progress in a low hassle way – for example by automatically gathering the data for the metrics, calculating them and outputting the results in a convenient way, i.e. as a weekly email.

When you track success it’s not enough just to watch the data itself in a pretty line graph – that’s like watching the waves on the ocean: it may be comforting but it doesn’t get you anywhere.

To succeed, you need to score yourself.

You need to create a score that tracks against a target of some kind – for example percentage of quota achieved, rank versus your competitors and so on.